July 15, 2008

It's with great pride that I officially confirm Twitter’s acquisition of Summize. The rationale for this transaction from Twitter can be found here. I’ll outline my motivation to sell our beloved Summize, talk about our experience soup to nuts, and recognize the players who made this deal possible.

Summize - A Brief History

Our passion for designing search applications brought us three co-founders, Abdur, Greg, and myself, together back in 2000. After years of building and launching dozens of highly scalable systems serving millions of users, in 2007 we set out to create our own new vertical search engine to help people find opinions and attitudes on the Web.

At Summize, we assembled a small, quirky, but highly efficient and experienced team to build a powerful platform to extract user opinions from blogs and review sites. Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, our cacographic Chief Scientist, applied machine learning techniques to understand how users express sentiment using common words and polarizing phrases (e.g., when someone says “nice” it isn’t necessarily in a positive sense). Dr. Eric Jensen, our first hire and perpetually caffeinated VP of Development, built the complex underlying data engine.

In 2008, we discovered Twitter as a source of the most timely and relevant opinions on trending topics. We immediately embarked on a plan to develop the best Twitter search and discovery application to serve the Twitter community and burgeoning Twitter ecosystem.

Summize – Nuts & Bolts

Excited by the potential of a realtime Twitter search, we unleashed Matt Sanford, a web crawling wizard, ops extraordinaire, measurement zealot, and foreign language nut, to shift his attention from blogs to microblogs, and to Twitter in particular.

Matt scurried the raw nuggets of data to Mike, an even bigger nut and a master juggler who to this day claims to have juggled SEVEN balls simultaneously. Mike, who responds well to donuts, just happens to be a C++ and Java guru so he churned out fancy beautified code to parse tweets, thread disparate conversations, and pluck out highly accurate and meaningful trending topics from the Twitter public timeline. The latter task is a really, really tough nut to crack, so it required a helping hand from our nutty professor AdburAbdir Abdur aka “El Hefe.”

Mike pipes the data into our database for Eric, who spends two hours a day either making the perfect cappuccino or walking 28 blocks to find it. But Eric’s also a self-acclaimed IR wunderkid who can speak in SQL and can invert, convert, revert, subvert, and even evert relational databases and inverted indices to do exactly what he wants. (Ok, I don’t know what that means, but that’s exactly the point). He wrung every bit of performance possible to deliver an awesome realtime indexing and query engine. He also implemented hyper-geospatial proximity search during one of his coffee breaks.

Greg, our CTO, the “Pixelator”, who frequently confines himself in his basement to align a single pixel to achieve ultimate perfection that only the enlightened can discern, also maintains this riveting blog. He once wanted to rename Summize “tweird”, so that tells you a lot about him. I do admit he’s pretty good at UI design (no surprise here as I taught him everything he knows, including how to manage geeks), assembled all the pieces and served up an elegant user experience for the Twitterati to marvel at.

The bottom line? In a nutshell, Summize nailed realtime conversational search right out the gate.

Summize – Twitter’s Missing Manual

Summize revealed the true power of Twitter and its thriving community. Right from our home page you can “see” what people are talking about at this moment via our trending topics. We tamed the Twitter public timeline by bringing some order to the chaos.

Type any query into Summize to “listen in” on conversations on practically any topic. What do people think about Hancock? What’s the buzz on Dark Knight or the new iPhone? What site is down?

It’s now effortless to find your taste neighbors and to connect with like-minded people worldwide. Simply search on keywords that interest you and start following. Experience conferences vicariously and monitor breaking news events as they unfold.

The “Aha! moment” for us was tracking what people are saying about Summize itself. We have been glued to summize.com nearly 24x7 since launch. For the first time we could listen, respond, and engage with our customers in realtime. This revelation was game changing for all of us. There is great potential for companies to get involved with their user base the way we and others like Zappos, JetBlue, Comcast, Southwest have.

Twitter and their investors understood the potential of Summize, hence the marriage between the two startups. There is a perfect technology fit, vision fit, and cultural fit as mentioned in the Twitter blog.

The acquisition enables Twitter to fully harness the core search, filtering, and discovery technology built by the extraordinarily talented Summize team. All five Summize engineers will be joining Twitter. I will continue as a consultant for a short period of time and then move on to spend more time with the family, of course, and eventually sprout another killer startup here in lovely Northern Virginia, a thriving hotbed for Web 2.0 companies (and, as Abdur would say, I am a cereal entrepreneur now).

Close - Personal Note and Acknowledgment

I have a long working relationship with my fellow co-founders, Greg and Abdur, so it is with mixed emotions for me to see them move to California. They have taught me far more than just information retrieval.

Eric Jensen also deserves recognition as a quasi-founder for joining Summize before we secured any funding. Eric is an exemplary technologist and a keen strategist who’s not afraid to take risk. He’ll definitely be someone to watch in the years ahead.

I’m thrilled for the Summize guys and for Jack, Ev, Biz and the Twitter team as they will benefit tremendously having Greg and Abdur in senior technology leadership roles.

I would like to acknowledge our angel investors who saw the potential in the Summize founding team from day one. A big thanks goes to Roger Richter and Tim Webb who are always on my side even when things look bleak. Another big thanks goes to John Burbank, Andrew Seligson, Seth Spalding of Passport Capital for leading our angel round and for listening to my wacky ideas. I’m also grateful to Jim Davidson, our former boss at AOL, for believing in us despite the obstacles we face out here in the East Coast.

During our travails as a coastally challenged startup we met with many VCs, but one VC firm stood out far above the rest—Union Square Ventures. There is a good reason why USV is admired by entrepreneurs and the Web 2.0 community—they are simply the best. In fact, the most important advice I received was from Brad Burnham and it’s still ingrained in my head, “Create something simple. Let the market pull you in.” Thank you, Brad, and thank you for introducing us to John Borthwick.

John and Andrew Weissman of Betaworks Studio saw the potential in Summize even before we launched our Twitter search. They worked tirelessly to open doors to help us get funding and/or partnering deals. They introduced us to Josh Auerbach, the most amazing deal maker ever and a really nice and funny guy overall, and they re-introduced us to Gerry Campbell, our former colleague at AOL Search (read Gerry's thoughts on the deal). Thank you, John, Andy, Josh, and Gerry. With Summize you have proven your “Outcubator” model.

This post cannot be complete without thanking Fred Wilson. Thank you, Fred for helping to make this deal happen. There’s a reason why we use “from:fredwilson” as our test query at Summize. If we don’t see any search results, then clearly “Something is Technically Wrong” in the social media world which requires immediate attention.

And last, but not least, I want to thank our loyal Summize fan base. There were so many Summize evangelists who supported us that it’s impossible to call out individuals. On behalf of the Summize team, I offer each and every one of you our sincerest gratitude.

June 23, 2008

Sorry for the delay but I have not had much time for a post. InfoScale
keeps getting better and this year we had lots of good participants and
papers. I thought I would layout a few belated highlights of the
conference from my point of view. It was a great honor to continue the
success of INFOSCALE in its 3rd year as one of its organizing
committee members. It is always difficult to continue the momentum of a
conference in its early years, but judging from the responses for this
year in terms of renowned PC members and high-quality submissions, we
are confident that INFOSCALE will soon be on par with other more
established conferences.

June 09, 2008

Today Apple will be hosting their Worldwide Developers Conference WWDC08 and we have the pleasure of providing live tracking of the event via Twitter updates. We believe this is a great opportunity to showcase the power of tracking global conversations and give new users exposure to our trending topics and sentiment technologies. We love the Twitter micro-blogging platform and the opportunity to provide this service to the community. Lastly, a big thanks Twitter for the link.

May 22, 2008

For those of you that have not found the DemoGirl site, I recommend checking it out. Molly does 2-3 minute screencasts on new sites so others can quickly check out the site and its functionality without having to sign-up or go there. While Summize has no sign-up barrior for people to use it, we do love seeing her talk about some of the great features and uses of our product.

May 21, 2008

The CIKM 2008 deadline is almost up. This year is going to be great with the venue being in Napa Valley. I thought our call for papers on our web site would be interesting to check out. Also, I am running this years Industry track so if you have something interesting for the conference please submit it.

May 15, 2008

InfoScale 2008 is almost here (June 4th - 6th 2008). We are now putting together our program and thought a quick preview of the keynotes and papers would be interesting. First, the little blurb on the focus of InfoScale:

"The Third International Conference on Scalable Information Systems will focus on a wide array of scalability
issues and investigate new approaches to tackle problems arising from the ever-growing size and complexity of
information of all kinds.
"

May 14, 2008

Last night we launched a local operator for our twitter search, enabling you to search within tweets near a location. For example, you can find what people are saying about Obama near:oregon while he campaigns there. The easiest way to find this operator is to use our advanced search page, there you will see an input box with "near this place." Just fill it in with your city, state, zip, etc. along with what you are looking for. Adam Ostrow and Danny Sullivan have already done a great job of reviewing this feature, but we wanted to provide some clarification here about exactly how it works.